In wireless local area network (WLAN) deployments, “sticky” clients are those clients that stay associated with an access point (AP) even though there are one or more other APs with a better link quality available to the client. When a client stays associated to an AP when it should not, this causes lower link quality, and also causes airtime usage for the client to be longer than average airtime usage, thus wasting WLAN airtime.
The reason for sticky client behavior is the diverse roaming algorithms that are implemented by different vendors of client devices. This behavior could be due to a variety of factors including that the client device does not search for beacons from APs other than the AP to which it is associated unless the quality of the link reduces to a very low level, that the client device tends to avoid disruption on active connections, and/or other factors.
In enterprise WLAN design and deployments, reducing the number of sticky clients is important to maintain overall network performance.